How To Prevent Gestational Diabetes

Gestational diabetes can happen during pregnancy. It affects the way cells use sugar, similarly to other types of diabetes. It causes high blood sugar and it’s harmful to both your baby’s health and yours.

The tricky part is the fact that there are no symptoms, so one should control their blood sugar levels throughout the pregnancy. Luckily, it can be controlled with healthy nutrition, exercise and medication, so there are no reasons for stress.

Gestational diabetes ceases after delivery; however, the mother stays at risk for type 2 diabetes afterwards. For all these reasons, gestational diabetes awareness should be raised in order to promote prevention and help mothers stay safe. In that respect, here are some things you should know that will help with prevention.

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How To Prevention Gestational Diabetes

What are the risk factors?

Let me start off with some exclamation points. Any women can suffer from gestational diabetes, but some groups are more prone to it than others. Pregnant ladies older than 25 are more likely to develop this type of diabetes.

Of course, there’s also the matter of family history. If someone in your family has type 2 diabetes, you are more likely to develop gestational diabetes. Other risk factors include excess weight and being of non-white race, for some reason.

What causes gestational diabetes?

The causes are not yet clear. Every woman needs to keep track of the way her body balances blood sugar levels as this is the main indicator of diabetes. Gestational diabetes happens when the mother’s body cannot produce enough insulin for both herself and the baby or when the body becomes resistant to it.

How to prevent it?

It would be ideal if you planned your pregnancy and started preparing for it beforehand. Checking your blood sugar level is the best way to determine how risky of a category you fall into.

If you are at risk of developing the illness, make sure you change your diet in order to arm your organism against it. Taking vitamins and coenzyme Q10 supplements is also a good idea. CoQ has an important role here as its deficiency increases blood sugar which leads to vascular injury.

This often results in issues related to diabetes and coronary diseases. Of course, you can try and get it through nutrition, but food contains small amounts of CoQ and that is why you should increase it in other ways. Nevertheless, in order to get more CoQ, you should eat plenty of meat, poultry and fish, as well as eggs and all sorts of nuts.

Vegetables with the highest counts of CoQ are cauliflower and broccoli, while strawberries and oranges are the healthiest fruit to eat when trying to prevent diabetes.

What if you get it anyway?

Not everything is in our power and sometimes unfortunate things happen. If this is the case and you do end up developing gestational diabetes, there are efficient ways to battle it. Surely, nutrition is something you should be mindful of, but the most efficient way to manage your diabetes is with exercise.

If you suffer from gestational diabetes, this means your blood glucose levels are higher than they should normally be. Exercise is the best counterattack as physical activity causes our muscles to take in more glucose. After exercise, the muscles remain more sensitive to insulin which is exactly the effect we want.

However, being pregnant, your exercising is limited and potentially dangerous, so you should avoid all activity that puts you at risk of falling down or injuring yourself. This is why walking, stationary cycling and swimming are the best choices. The recommended amount of workout is about 30 minutes per day.

If this is too difficult for you to sustain, start with 15 minutes a day and increase the time once you become more comfortable with the arrangement.

Conclusion

Pregnancy has us worried about so many things already, so it’s not such great news to know there is another one on the list. However, there’s no place for panic. Simply monitor those blood sugar levels and chances are you won’t have anything to do with gestational diabetes.

On the other hand, if it does happen, it’s not the end of the world, you’ll just need to implement a few more healthy habits which can only benefit you and your baby and everything should be just fine.

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